'The Shallows' review: Blake Lively swims for her life in tense shark tale

Shot in a creamy, sunny style suggesting a Sports Illustrated swimsuit-issue video shoot gone wrong, "The Shallows" belongs almost entirely to Blake Lively, who plays Nancy, a resourceful medical student from Texas vacationing in Mexico with a purpose. Years ago her mother, a recent casualty of cancer, conceived her on the very beach (the "secret beach," everyone keeps calling it) where the doctor-in-training has brought her surfboard. There is a great white shark in the area, however, feeding on a dead whale. So the secret beach isn't such a good place to surf after all, and the antagonist is starring in its own movie called "Finding Lively."

Whatever; it's summer; it's barely 80 minutes long minus the end credits. If the amount of surfing/suffering/staring-at-dark-skies footage rendered in slow motion were depicted at normal speed, "The Shallows" would run about a minute and a half. In fact the real name of the beach may well be Camara Lenta, which is Spanish for slow motion.

The script by Anthony Jaswinski isolates Lively's character straight off. For much of the time Nancy, who sutures her own shark-bite wound with a couple of handy earrings, finds herself stranded on a rock, with the tide coming in and only an injured sea gull for conversational company. Ideally a sequel to "The Shallows" ("Shallows 2: This Time It's Really Very Shallow") would spin off the gull for its own film co-starring Wilson the volleyball from "Cast Away" and Daniel Radcliffe's gassy corpse from the upcoming "Swiss Army Man."

Columbia Pictures / Handout

Blake Lively in the shark-attack film "The Shallows."

Blake Lively in the shark-attack film "The Shallows."

(Columbia Pictures / Handout)

The director is Jaume Collet-Serra, who has made several modestly budgeted Liam Neeson films including "Non-Stop." That one confined its increasingly implausible but surprisingly engaging action to the inside of a plane. Here we're in similarly tight circumstances. I hated the over-reliance on video chat and texting footage, shown in supersize images on screen. (In these bits Brett Cullen plays Nancy's dad, concerned about her desires to drop out of med school, and Sedona Legge is her younger sister.) A shark victim's video-cam helmet, floating in the shallows, affords Nancy her "127 Hours" moment, a selfie farewell speech when things look blackest. But do you think she dies in her own movie? Do you? Have you ever seen a movie before?

We're strictly in three-C's territory with this one: character stuff (grieving, doubts, family); cleavage; and chomping. According to the Scholastic paperback "Shark Attack!" my daughter's reading, only "three or four humans a year" worldwide die from shark attacks. "The Shallows" respects those numbers, though when the fatalities all happen in the same damn shallows, you notice. The climactic battle of wits between human and shark leads to a conclusion that got the audience whooping pretty good. The rest of it's OK.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 24, 2016, in the Arts + Entertainment section of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "Surfer girl swims for her life in shallow shark tale - `The Shallows'" —
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